Lisa Hacker

Self and Other: Meeting in the Middle

It has been nearly twenty years since I first saw the movie “Schindler’s List”, but I still remember the evening with perfect clarity. The grainy images of emaciated, naked old men running in wobbly circles under the watchful eye of the Germans  still causes my breath to catch in my throat. Even more distressing is the picture of young children huddled together in silence of the dark depths of a filthy latrine. I had always known of the evils of the Holocaust, so while these images were troubling, they were not unexpected. What was unexpected, however,  was the introduction of Oskar Schindler-a man who took great risks in order to help save more than 1,100 Jews from Hitler’s regime.

As I left the theatre, I felt emotionally drained and intellectually robbed.  How could it have happened that in all my years of schooling, I had never known that in the midst of the horror and chaos of the Holocaust, there had been this unexpected hero?  Even now, years later, I still ask myself the same question:

Why had this man’s name never surfaced in my history books?

This movie gave me the opportunity to see a snapshot of history that no teacher, professor, or book had ever been able to reveal. By showing me that one sliver of humanity, a brightly shining needle in the death-stack of the Holocaust, my entire understanding of that historic event was altered. And I realized that no matter how much one thinks one knows, there is always another side of the story waiting to be revealed, understood, and appreciated.

My exposure to the intertextuality between colonial and postcolonial literature has brought me to a similar place of enlightenment.

 I’ve always enjoyed reading, but I see now that my understanding of things I’ve read has always just skimmed the surface. Now I see that enjoying these books as merely stories without understanding the places and passions that created their characters is akin to grading a research paper solely on its mechanics. The point of the writing has been missed and its wrapping has become more important than the gift itself. The postcolonial writer’s gift to us, the reader, is the opportunity to expand our understanding of history beyond the nationalistic, Eurocentric foundations that many traditional history classes of our youth were built upon. 

In his final exam, Matt Richards said that he, too, came to a place where he found himself re-evaluating his approach to understanding literature. “I used to read novels and focus on what the story was about without looking into the issues that were being addressed.” Those other issues are not always easy to see, as is the case with Robinson Crusoe and Friday.

I had never read this novel before our class, but I know that if I had read it without direction, I would have come to the end of the novel with two impressions. The first impression would be that this was a great adventure story. The second impression would be that Friday was lucky to have been “saved:.  I would not have missed the fact that Crusoe “acquired” a black servant, but I might have been fooled into thinking that the two were both good for each other, existing together on the island in a reciprocal relationship that benefited them both.

But now I can remove my rose-colored reading glasses to see that there is a much more complex story beneath those surface assumptions. I see now that because Friday’s voice was oppressed in this novel, the voice of the Self becomes dominant, unquestioned, and authoritative. The Other is dismissed as insignificant while the Self is elevated and exalted.

Perhaps Friday would have preferred to have returned to his village. Perhaps he would have preferred to have been the one giving the orders. We will never know, because Friday did not have much of a voice. Once those rose-colored glasses are crushed into the ground by Friday’s black, calloused heel, I can see much more clearly. And with my new understanding of the complexities of Self and Other, I can look at the rest of colonial and postcolonial literature with those new eyes. Before my understanding of colonial and postcolonial literature, I would have gotten to the end of Robinson Crusoe and wondered what in the world ever happened to Crusoe.

Now I find myself agonizing, instead, over the fate of Friday.

I can now better empathize with Lucy’s detesting of the daffodils and Jasmine’s resolve to run. The women no longer seem to be just bitter or flighty. I now feel that I am able to understand not only these characters, but I am also thinking that I should go back and reread much of what I have already read in the old canon of Western classics, looking for connections with the modern canon of multicultural literature.

Who knows what I might discover? Just like I found Oskar Schindler quietly resting in the middle between the horror of the Hitler and the genocide of the Jews, what can be found, now, in that middle place of debate and reconsideration between Self and Other?

 This re-consideration of truth has led me to think that I could do a much better job teaching my own students if I used a blend of intertextuality between the old and new canons and historicism. I  think that junior high students would be particularly sensitive to the blending of historical truth with literary fiction. Imagining a history book peppered with excerpts and interviews from Walcott, Kincaid, and Achebe gives me goosebumps.

I’m thinking that I should write it.